I picked this up over at Philip Bloom’s site. Tester 13 has released a firmware hack for the Panasonic GH1. The hack updates the bit rate to 50MBit at 24fps with no transcoding required. This is a big step forward for Gh1 shooters. Here is a little info from the EOS HD website. Click Here To Download The Firmware Hack.
Summary, what is means for the none-techno-geek
Hugely better image quality. 50MBit MJPEG shows zero compression artefacts, zero mud and much more photo-like gradients, tones and textures
It’s better looking than the 5D Mark II’s H.264 and less compressed
MPEG 50Mbit shows low noise and the noise is of a finer grain, more film-like
The workflow improvements are immeasurable. The 50Mbit MJPEG, this can be edited directly, no transcoding required. As for AVCHD, thanks to Tester13 the native 24p can go straight into Log & Transfer without pulldown or deinterlacing work. Before I was waiting around 6 or 7 hours per project for Voltaic to transcode and deinterlace the GH1’s AVCHD to ProRes. Now the same amount of footage can be done in one step in Final Cut Pro Log & Transfer and takes 30 minutes.
Non-native 24p 32Mbit AVCHD (60i) can be played back in-camera. Focus assist works in both AVCHD and MJPEG mode. It’s expected playback of native 24p AVCHD can be fixed in the near future once a patch is released by Abed.
A JPEG is saved containing shot EXIF info, shutter speed, ISO, etc.
The image is smoother looking and better scaled from the 12MP CMOS compared to the 5D Mark II which has 22MP to deal with. Pixel binning is in action, not line skipping.